A Chill in the Air

I wandered around Rockport this morning running errands and experienced a distinct chill in the air. I forgot to put a sweater on my oldest son and felt like a bad mother. It seems like just the other day when I forgot to put shorts on him instead of pants and felt like a bad mother. Maybe the common element here is that I usually feel like I'm failing him, at least when it comes to listening to the weather report. Last year we grew gourds at the old Ohio homestead - here they are in all their glory.
This year the crop was not so bumper-ish. In fact, my brother, who has been faithfully tending them, reported to me that it is likely that not a single pie could be made by combining the entire crop. Needless to say, the crop from the old Ohio homestead will not be taken to market in 2009. So it's a good thing that I have my vintage furniture and handpainted pieces to fall back on. Can you hear a tinge of sarcasm? What I really wanted to feature in the photo is what the gourds are arranged on: an industrial cart painted in aqua with just the right amount of wear and tear. One of my all-time favorite pieces.

We are gearing up for our Harvest Festival here in Rockport. Put it on your calendar now folks. Plenty of homemade pies, wacky scarecrows, wacky Rockport-ers, and a cider donut or two.

Art in the marketplace

One of the most difficult things about creating pieces for the store is balancing artistic interests with commercial ones. Unless you have a sizable trust fund or the ability to go for months without eating, you have to be concerned about making items that people will buy. The trick is to make pieces that you actually want to make that people will buy. It has taken me a long time to figure this out. One of the ways to address this commercial/artistic tension is to look to the traditional decorative arts for inspiration. These contain design elements that have stood the test of time, and don't usually involve a decorative piece with an image of a dog sitting on a pumpkin howling at the moon with the caption "Happy HOWL-oween!" for example.

One such timeless motif is the birds-and-vine chinoiserie style, which has the added appeal of being a trend right now. Hopefully it won't catch on at the level of the toile craze of the early part of this decade. I knew we had reached a level of insanity with that look when I saw women actually wearing capri pants made out of toile. Very strange to see women wearing upholstery patterns as clothing, like Scarlett O'Haras for the 21st century except not nearly as attractive as their fictional counterpart. Anyway, the point is that I painted the tables in the above photograph in the chinoiserie style, which I find challenging artistically and also am happy with at a commercial level. I had just brought the tables into the shop when they were purchased by Francesca, also known as motherblogger. She has a great sense of design and I was very glad to know they were going to go live with her.

I've also been making these composite images with paint and old books. I've created images on boxes out of these elements but this is the first canvas I've done. Obviously, it is not breaking new ground artistically but it is a fun design nonetheless.

Summer is winding down. The small upright dot in front of the boat is my 3-year-old son getting in some beach time before he heads to work with me. The only good aspect of the end of summer is the prospect of Fall - the only season more beautiful than summer on Cape Ann...

If Summer doesn't come to you...

...Then you have to make it yourself.  Summer, that is.  The weather - cold, rain, fog, and more cold - still isn't cooperating, and it's all anyone can talk about here in coastal New England, ad nauseam.  I feel the pain myself.  After suffering through our raw winters, the least we can have is 90 days of relatively moderate weather.  But not this year.  This year we have already lost the possibility of a happy June, and are now in the process of ruining July.  I need to move on from this topic, however.  I mean, how long can one complain about lousy weather?  I refuse to find out.  And to help myself along, I'm posting a picture of an electrically-painted antique piece that will provide the viewer with a jolt of summertime color.  If I can't have summer outside, then at least I will have it inside.  And I promise: no more complaining.  Until it gets too hot, that is.  Then I'll be sure to have something to say.

June in Rockport

Things are quiet here in Rockport. We seem to go directly from a sort of April chill (with a few sunny days thrown just to remind us of how people live in other places) to the pavement-melting heat of July. It is technically June, almost technically summer, yet here I am ensconced in a sweater. And I am not alone. Most of the (very few) people I see passing by my window look dressed for another season entirely. I have had just three people in the shop today, two of whom looked dazed and confused, as if they meant to go on summer vacation in a nice little coastal town and ended up here instead. But just wait, I tell myself - in a few weeks, these same deserted sidewalks will be teeming with scantily-clad people who should, by all rights, be ensconced in sweaters. The shock of so much naked flesh here in Ye Olde New Englande juxtaposed as it is with what had been, just days before, chowder weather, is a lot for anyone to bear. Yet one must, in the retail business, take the bad with the good. Or, in the case of the current climate, economic and otherwise, the bad with the bad.

So on to the actual purpose of this post: Handpainted Wooden Boxes. These are useful creations, all one-of-a-kind, although the general themes do get repeated. The images are hand-cut from vintage paper and mounted on handpainted boxes. Here a few to spark the imagination. The rest of our current stock is shown at both our real store and our virtual one.

What's New?

I've been putting my little gocco (rhymes with loco) printer to work lately. For those of you unfamiliar with gocco, it's basically a tabletop screenprinter. It's great for creating original designs, all produced by hand of course, but in a relatively more streamlined way. Each design can be created multiple times using the same screen, but a screen does have a life - usually 50 or so printings. In that sense, each design is a limited edition. There are people out in gocco-land who create unbelievably complex designs with their printers - it is really fascinating once you check into what's out there. My images are more straightforward: here are a few designs I sell in the shop as hand-screened postcards and notecards. If your interest in them moves beyond just looking and into purchasing them, you can check them out at the online store here.


Whale - looking a little like a wood-block print.

Whale in aqua - a little bit more modern.


My nod to Motif No.1 - how much more amusing would it be to see the birds attacking all of us who endlessly photograph this fake fishing shack? Didn't quite have the nerve for that.

Spring, definitely.

Wow. Two months since I last blogged (is that a verb?). Been very busy at a lot of nothing. The shop is shaping up for the summer - just one short week until Memorial Day! For those of you who care, the website died a lonely death. Just as I completed updating it, my hosting service informed me they would no longer support my software. The software that I used in designing the website was, indeed, nearly obsolete, but what could be more appropriate for use in a store that sells vintage pieces? A vintage website for a vintage store. Sadly, my hosting service did not agree with the inherent charm of vintage software, and we have parted ways. But never fear, some sort of internet presence will be available by the Memorial Day deadline. Meanwhile, the town of Rockport is festive for Spring, as this weekend we celebrate Motif No. 1 Days. What are Motif No. 1 Days you ask? A two-day celebration of the arts, centered around a red fishing shack so beloved by artists as a subject that it was dubbed Motif No. 1 by an art teacher (perhaps tired of looking at so many renditions of the same building). Anyway, here in Rockport we love our Motif, and have set aside a time every Spring to ritually celebrate its existence. Here is our Festival poster, with artwork created by a very talented 9-year-old third-generation Rockport artist.

www.rockportusa.com/motif1days

Spring, I think.

Spring is in the air in Rockport. Hordes of people are walking around here today with their wool coats open and their scarves dragging behind them through the leftover little piles of dirty snow. Inside the shop, however, all is not so spry. The nice weather caught me by surprise, and my window display still looks trapped somewhere in mid-January. Dark looming trees and lots of brown. But never fear! By next weekend Butterflies will be fluttering by and creatively crafted flowers will be blooming in my window. If you're in town, stop by. No doubt we'll have a blizzard just in time for Spring.

In honor of this weekend's time change, and the presumably longer light it will bring into our lives, here's a little sampling of a few of the lamps I have in the store right now.






Check out more at www.sycamorehollow.net

Well, Dear Reader, it has been a long while since last we connected through this new-fangled medium. You haven't missed much, let me assure you. The shop has settled into its post-Autumn low-fi hum. You can hardly hear the sound of it running at all. Which poses a question much like the old tree falling in a forest conundrum. If a shop is open, but there is no one in town to come in the shop, is the shop actually in business? Rockport gets so quiet at this time of year, I sometimes feel as though I'm sitting in my living room instead of my store (a living room overflowing with lamps and pillows - much like a crazy grandmother's...)

The holidays will provide some excitement, and, as we are always reminded, they are just around the corner. Hopefully the economic doldrums won't keep people from running around and at least feeling festive, even if they are unable to open their wallets and pour credit cards on the counter. ("I'll take two of everything!") The retail party is definitely over, but my shop is small enough and eccentric enough that I was never an attendee at the party anyway.

I've been busy with Autumn-related activities, one of which was to go to my family's farm to pick up some home-grown gourds to sell at Rockport's Harvest Festival a few weeks ago. I feel as proud as if I had planted them myself - oh wait! I did! (along with many other people in my family.) The gourds now grace the shop and it is fun to see them piled high in the manner of a Martha Stewart magazine spread. Not that I'm comparing our modest harvest to what goes on over at her amazing farm, Chanticleer Corners. (I don't think Chanticleer Corners is actually the farm's name, but it is close enough.)

Upcoming events include our annual Fall Sale & Amazing Bake Sale (to benefit the Cape Ann Food Pantry), held in conjunction with a few other Rockport shops on November 1st. And to make the transition into the holiday season, on November 7th (!) I'm a part of the Holiday Gift Show held here on Cape Ann. Hope to see you at these events!

Labor Day Blowout Sale!!! This Weekend Only!!!

Fortunately I don't have the personality of a car salesman (although I do have the lungs), but, like a car salesman, this Labor Day weekend only I would be willing to offer 0% financing on, say, a sheet of Japanese paper. I have sympathy for the customer who appreciates beauty but cannot afford to choose between a sheet of expensive paper and a few trips to Starbucks, all in the same week. Shop at Sycamore Hollow and we'll work something out. Ah...it seems like only a few posts ago that I was talking about Memorial Day, and now look where we are - Labor Day! I should be sad, as Rockport is a seasonal town, and goes from streets filled with naked (or nearly so) bodies on their way to the beach, to streets so empty small clothed children could play entire innings of baseball without having to pause for traffic. But then I would call the truant officer because those same children should be in school. And they definitely shouldn't be playing in the street. I don't actually mind Rockport's quiet season(s), because they provide a nice contrast to the rest of the year, and the town itself is just as beautiful and amazing as ever. Have a great weekend, don't labor (get it?) too hard, and join me for my next post: the Website Saga, part III: Will I Ever Get Photos Uploaded?

Crazy-time in Rockport

The 4th of July in Rockport is a lot of fun... If you're a six-year-old in search of free candy and not afraid to scrabble around in the street for it after a grown man parading by tosses it at your face. The rest of us have a pretty good time as well; the day holds sights not easily viewed in a small New England town the rest of the year. Lots of naked flesh on display, some to happy effect, some not. Last year I took a picture of a rain-soaked shirtless middle-aged man with the ensuing paunch strolling along the sidewalk barefoot and sporting a mounted deer's head with the antlers decorated for the occasion. This parade of strangeness is followed by Rockport's grand old tradition of setting afire a 20-foot-high gasoline-soaked tower of pallets. It is a sight to behold, and as other towns eliminate fireworks due to budget cuts, our bonfire rages on. Oh yeah - and I do open the shop's doors, just in case someone is dying for a vintage planter in the shape of lovebirds and can't wait another minute to buy it.

Summer is Here...

Memorial Day Weekend in Rockport means hordes of people flooding into town, looking for a vintage lamp or two to start their summer off right. No, the reality is that people will be looking for a hot dog or two. Or an ice cream cone or two. But just in case hot dogs & ice cream are not what you're in the market for, check out what is new in the store: pillows created by an artist in Kennebunk, Maine, with screenprinted images that appear abstract at first, until the viewer realizes that the image depicts a ship's rigging. Clever, beautiful, and handmade - it doesn't get any better than that!